It is known to make a hollow baked product from an edible, baked flat wafer cake that can be shaped when hot and that has a rigid cup shape during and/or after the shaping process, normally when it has cooled. More particularly, the hollow baked product is at least partially formed from a fluent bakable batter for long-life bakery products made of flour and/or starch, preferably dough and bakable batter being used as disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 7,754,268. The simple method of baking a flat wafer piece is combined with the possibility of plasticizing it at or just below baking temperature through the melted sugar content so as to be able to easily mechanically reshape it, but then to let the sugar solidify through simple and rapid cooling and thus to stabilize the obtained shape. This results in a brittle, hard product. At room temperature, these wafers substantially consisting of a starch-sugar (sugar substitute)-protein mixture are below the glass transition temperature. Moreover, the sugar portion is mostly solidified as a glassy melt and therefore has a particularly crisp texture.
Typical sugar contents for rolled ice cream cones are, for example, 30 to 50% by weight based on flour, or 60 to 100% in the case of hollow wafer sticks.
Methods and apparatuses for shaping wafer-like long-life bakery products are also known and, accordingly, can also be found in patent literature, for example in U.S. Pat. No. 4,624,855 and U.S. Pat. No. 4,694,741 that describe an apparatus and a method for making rolled, preferably conical hollow wafers usable as ice-cream cones. In the thus produced individual wafers, in particular baked from a sugar-containing dough, in the soft and shapable state for baking, the flat wafer cakes are first rolled into a particular shape of the hollow wafers and are then solidified in this shape, where each flat wafer cake is first freely rolled into a predetermined shape of the hollow wafer, and then the finish-rolled hollow wafer is calibrated by plastically shaping edge regions to a predetermined longitudinal extension of the hollow wafer, and subsequently, the calibrated hollow wafer solidifies.
These rolled cones have proven themselves in practice due to their properties such as, for example, stability, appearance, haptics, processability, ease of filling, etc. and are therefore one of the most common wafer-like hollow body shapes.
An alternative apparatus for making a wafer product is shown in DE 10 005 500. Here, substantially flat wafer product is deep drawn so that side walls are formed that are preferably perpendicular opposite each other in the upper region, the wafer product being created by using a shaping punch and pressing a substantially flat wafer piece into a corresponding hollow mold, and where the upper edge of the preferably perpendicularly opposing side walls of the deep-drawn wafer product are cut to be flush. The also disclosed production method is comparable to the shaping method of die forging. After the baking process, the wafer sheet is pressed in the hot and therefore shapable state by a punch into a die and is squeezed between these two elements.
Another method for shaping an edible hollow container from wafer dough is shown in WO 1999/033348. Here, an also flat wafer sheet is drawn by means of a punch into a die. Due to the shapes, in particular the proportions between the circumference of the baked flat wafer cake and the circumference of the opening of the finished hollow container, bulging can occur in the region of the opening.
In practice, experience has shown that it can be desirable to provide edible, hollow baked products, in particular edible hollow containers from wafer-like dough or baked substances, with reinforcement ribs so as to positively influence their physical properties. However, implementing ribs with the above-described production methods is limited in that after solidifying, thicker areas have different physical properties and, for example become soft or too hard. Nevertheless, in order to provide thicker regions in wafer products, it is therefore advantageous to configure these regions in a multilayer manner. Forming folds during a deep-drawing process is one possibility to achieve this multilayer arrangement.
The disadvantage of the prior art is that it is not possible to provide specific structures with multilayer regions in hollow, baked products or edible hollow containers such that the structures have improved stability, appearance, physical properties, crispness, eating experience and sound during consumption, etc.